this post was submitted on 11 Oct 2024

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If you were tasked to train/teach dolphins how to be artists and express themselves via creative expression, what method of doing so would you designate for them? (lemmy.ml)

submitted 2 months ago by [email protected] to c/asklemmy

21 comments fedilink hide all child comments

Was wondering this in celebration of the fact dolphins have officially been confirmed to have their own translatable proto-language, a longtime speculation we kind of already knew and which fulfills a friend's prophecy. It's common to train animals to perceive and perform art, and/or for them to already have a sense of what it is. Give an elephant a brush and a canvas and they'll paint glyphs of other elephants, chimps can draw avant-garde "masterpieces", and pigeons can even be trained to recognize the difference between good and bad art.

Dolphins surpass all of these animals in intelligence. But there's just one problem, they live underwater. And water tends to destroy most art mediums. Paper canvases shrivel, residue washes and floats away, hammers made for sculpting tend to strike softer, sculpting ice floats, fashion requires sources of fabric you can't get underwater, you get the idea. A dolphin's life is Murphy's Law for an artist. But for an artist, if there's a will, there's a way, and humans are known to challenge what we expect to be ways in which art can be created, such as with crop circles, Nazca lines, shadow art, and soap sculptures made from microwaving soap into molds. What improvised method/means of artform would you coach dolphins to do who want to be artists if you had to do so in some way?

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[–] OldManBOMBIN 10 points 2 months ago (1 children)

I'd follow the Dr. Lily program and take a bunch of LSD and hire some gal to whack em off. If nothing else, we'll get some Pollock knockoffs.

[–] HootinNHollerin 6 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Then they graduate to DMT and pegging

[–] OldManBOMBIN 4 points 2 months ago

And Hieronymus Bosch

[–] [email protected] 6 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Singing and Rock Gardening/Object Arranging would probably be the first route to go.

[–] OldManBOMBIN 2 points 2 months ago

I had a band back in the '60s that had a dolphin as a singer. Called the "10 Meters Off The Beach Boys"

[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (5 children)

The fuck, I've been looking forward to this for like my whole life, literally whales and cetaceans language being translated, and I totally missed the fact that someone in Iceland figured it out already?

Was there zero freaking announcements of us discovering intelligent language from animals?

[–] HootinNHollerin 2 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

Check out [email protected]

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 months ago (1 children)

That sounds like a joke article.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (1 children)

it is, whoops.

i know they've been studying dolphin with AI for a while now and grabbed the first article because I thought this announcement was real.

now I'm pretty confused, I guess the joke article is satirizing like one step further than the actual progress they've made with translating cetacean languages.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 months ago

AFAIK, we have managed to translate some words we taught them, meaning they're capable of learning new words and using them.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Who knew the secret to learning these things was having a TikTok account

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

plus familiarity with using shitty AI voices.

That's how people know you're a journalist.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 months ago (1 children)

You're referring to the parody story. The real thing did happen, just much more recently and being a much less exciting process.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (1 children)

oh, they've been studying dolphin language with AI for so long, I just grabbed the first article.

so who actually discovered it?

isn't the process the same? they used AI to analyze dolphin sounds? I know they've been doing this for cetaceans for a while now.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 months ago (1 children)

They have. It's a team effort pioneered by Denise Herzing and is half-way to its end. It's not like we discovered anything that parallels us though, the small-talk the team has studied with is more like "my name is X" or "let's hunt that fish" or "I'm bored", basically tamagotchi levels of communication and only just enough to get some ideas.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

I'm only semi-jokingly putting forth the assertion that those limited sentences are mostly "us".

thank you for the link.

[–] Num10ck 2 points 2 months ago

synchronized swimming

[–] OldManBOMBIN 2 points 2 months ago

If you want a more serious answer than my LSD statement, the obvious answer is synchronized swimming and bubble tricks

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 months ago

Mosaics.

[–] ShittyBeatlesFCPres 1 points 2 months ago

Jam band. Dolphins love Phish.

I’ll show myself out.

[–] Nefara 1 points 2 months ago

Dance, and music. It could probably be argued that dolphins already dance and don't need any extra encouragement. I bet a dolphin would love to play with a sound board that could play tones when buttons are pushed. Object arrangement, like someone else said. Sand patterns maybe. They can also interact with things out of the water too so painting isn't so ridiculous, they just don't have the dexterous appendages that elephants or chimps do.